EPA has finally issued a final rule including vapor intrusion in the Hazard Ranking System. The good news is that this is appropriate, because VI is one of the few real hazards regulated by the Superfund program. The bad news is that the Superfund program is so hopeless that promulgation of the rule will probably substantially multiply the cost of addressing VI without buying an ounce of additional public health protection.
In a blog post more than five years ago, I provided a rant that I feel has stood the test of time. In that post, I asked why Superfund was ill-suited to address VI, even though it’s precisely what EPA should be doing.
Why should this be so? Could it be because CERCLA is the last bastion of almost totally pure command and control regulation? Might CERCLA remedy decisions take less time if EPA did not have to select remedies, but instead only identified appropriate cleanup standards and let PRPs select the remedy? Might cleanups get implemented faster if the PRPs’ obligation was simply to meet cleanup standards and provide sufficient information to EPA or 3rd party auditors to demonstrate that the cleanup standards have in fact been met?
I hope that the new administration doesn’t roll back this rule while leaving CERCLA in place, because that would be backwards. I hope instead that the administration leaves the rule in place, but takes a hard run at really reforming CERCLA. The administration could work with Congress to amend CERCLA to provide that EPA would promulgate cleanup standards for different media and then allow PRPs to attain those standards without direct government oversight.
This is, of course, not a massive right-wing plot. Many left-leaning states, including the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts, have done exactly that. Massachusetts has been operating a privatized system for more than 20 years. If CERCLA were thus amended, I think I could die, or at least, retire, happy.
And I won’t even try to pretend that this clip [Click here for link.] is really relevant, but it just seemed right.
